Mahmoud Abbas

Mahmoud Abbas (26 March 1935-) was President of Palestine from 8 May 2005, succeeding Yasser Arafat.

Biography
Mahmoud Abbas was born on 26 March 1935 in Safed, Mandatory Palestine to a Sunni Muslim family. His family fled to Syria after the 1948 Palestine war, and he graduated from the University of Damascus with a law degree before heading to Egypt and the Soviet Union. While at Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow, he claimed that the murder of 6,000,000 Jews in the Holocaust was a "fantastic lie" in his thesis, "The Other Side: The Secret Relationship between Nazism and Zionism". It was published in 1984 in Arabic, and it showed his anti-Semitism; even though he would later condemn the Holocaust in 2014 as the most heinous crime in history, he defended his assertation that the Zionists and Nazis had worked together in the years leading up to World War II and had a hand in the massacres. Abbas joined the Palestine Liberation Organization and Fatah in 1961, and he funded the 1972 Munich Massacre. On 19 March 2003, Yasser Arafat appoined him Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority during the Second Intifada in a time where the United States refused to negotiate with the PLO due to their terrorism and betrayal of the 1993 Oslo Accords. He became President of Palestine on 8 May 2005 after Arafat's death, and he became rivals with Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad movements due to his pragmatic policies, and on 22 August 2015 he resigned from leading the PLO, although he was still the leader of Palestine. Abbas incited violence that led to the Silent Intifada in 2014, the Palestinian struggle for the Dome of the Rock, and in 2015 he again incited violence in the Knife Intifada against Israel in Jerusalem.